President Trump may not sign the tax bill until January even after congressional Republicans passed it in a rush to get it to the White House before Christmas, his top economic adviser said Tuesday.

Rather, the administration may hold off on signing the bill into law in order to avoid an awkward vote on spending cuts that would be mandated under pay-as-you-go law. If Trump signs the bill in 2018 rather than 2017, he would avoid that vote for another year and take a leverage point away from Democrats.

“There’s a technical issue on something called PAYGO,” National Economic Council director Gary Cohn said Wednesday morning at a public interview with the publication Axios.

PAYGO requires that tax cuts added to the deficit be offset [with] mandatory spending cuts to certain government programs. Congress wouldn’t have control over those cuts, and they would cut deeply into Medicare, farm subsidies, and other government programs. Neither Democrats nor Republicans would favor those cuts.

GOP leaders have reassured lawmakers that the automatic cuts will be waived.

The article phrases Trump’s proposed move in terms of taking a leverage point from Democrats. That makes it a good move under the Anything That Makes Democrats Cry Is a Good Thing style of conservatism that now reigns under Donald Trump.

But under the old style of conservatism that is still observed by me and about three of you, this is a bad thing — because Trump is trying to avoid a law that makes sure tax cuts don’t add to the deficit. The debt and deficit are primarily a spending problem, and this action shows that spending will not be addressed.

That we routinely vote to burden our children with crushing debt is a fundamental weak point in the structure of our republic — and absent a constitutional amendment that the public does not want (for obvious reasons), this structural flaw will be our ruin.

At least a handful of us noticed the hole in the ship’s hull before it sank. That’s something, right?